


Painting A Picture That Doesn't Exist

by noctecat



Category: Professional Wrestling, World Wrestling Entertainment
Genre: Drabble, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-07
Updated: 2019-06-07
Packaged: 2020-04-12 06:19:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,090
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19126336
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/noctecat/pseuds/noctecat
Summary: Their world has always been blurred.





	Painting A Picture That Doesn't Exist

**Author's Note:**

> A sleepy drabble, dripping in figurative language and lack of plot structure. If that's not your dig, then skip. If it is, I hope you enjoy. :)

In their world, it’s all about the blurred lines.

Decisions are made. They’re told when to go out there, who they’re going to talk to, what they should say. It’s there, in blue Bic pen-strokes. But then there’s a tone shift as they’re speaking, an off-cue laugh, a snarky add-on, and it’s like someone running water over the script, the ink melting before their eyes. It starts as a trickle, but quickly becomes a steadily flowing river as one day, one of them takes it too far. And then the other takes it further, and then nothing is legible anymore, it’s all blurred and run into each other, and they’re all past the point of no return.

The lines between Dean and Seth have always been blurred.

The two of them, as an idea, have never been detailed or defined, sketched out in great clarity. Seth, by his own admission, likes his life to be drawn out; he likes being able to see the lines, to know where he sits between them and amongst them, to have an idea of the strokes he appears in to others. Dean doesn’t, but he doesn’t fight it, either; he slips amongst the sketches, navigates them as they come and as they go, watches their outlines and shapes change and adjust accordingly just as quickly. The passive viewer at the art gallery; not the artist. He lets others define him but never defines himself, and so their interpretations float, like faint drafts yet to be inked in, never to be inked in. But that as well isn’t Dean, that’s Seth’s vision of Dean, and so probably exists just as impermanently as all the others.

But there were never any clear lines at all between them, not even a single slash tearing across the page. Seth could never read Dean; just when he thought he had finally focused in on a part of the image, Dean would do something he hadn’t expected at all, the equivalent of throwing a glass of ice water in his face, and the vision he thought he saw would dissolve away into ambiguity again. But then Dean, for all his ducking and weaving, and for all Seth’s supposedly high-definition world, could never predict him, either. Seth would do things that seemed almost predictable, paint-by-numbers laid out before him, and Dean would blow up as though blindsided, suddenly, the lenscap placed over his eyes. Dean always seemed like the type to grit his teeth and work around it when met with a sudden wayward turn, but when the contours and hues of Seth’s picture abruptly change, swinging to one side or dropping to another, it’s not so easy for him to work around.

Sometimes the blurriness was good, like staring into an abstract watercolor where all the colors are complementary and melt into one another. They didn’t have to define things, not for themselves or anyone else. No one could define them, and so no one asked questions about this detail or that. They could just be, able to exist in their vagueness as others were able to exist in their inked, colored and printed lives.

Then there were the other times. When the blurriness was from cinder-block dust thrown in your eyes or your brain still spinning from a blow to the head. Tears streaming down cheeks and being unsure whether it’s the physical pain or the hurting in your heart. It was both of them being conflicted but not being able to say why; not being able to find what drew them together or pick out what pushed them apart. All it created was confusion, squinting in a desperate attempt to figure out what obvious feature they were supposed to be seeing but weren’t, and all that bred was frustration, and frustration was simply more fuel to the fire.

When Dean told him he was leaving, it scared him because it seemed so definitive. Like this would finally be the one clear shot in their gallery that defined the collection, the moment they had stopped painting in watered-down pigments that refused to stay separate or in one place. He had wished for it for years, to find and slot into place the final puzzle-piece in the thousand-piece world he had built up around him, but when he thought he saw it on the horizon, it scared him. He wanted to retreat from the sun coming into focus ahead of him and let the fog he had become so familiar with envelop him again, even with all the dangers lurking in shadows it brought with it.

But if Seth thought the leaving was to be the sun come to evaporate the fog from the ground, it was instead the night come to plunge him into darkness and layer on mist even further. Seth could barely see Dean at all, now. At least before, he had a vague idea, a silhouette, one he could glance at and feel whether it was one that drew him in or turned him away. Your first impression is your most authentic - something like that. But now the picture was entirely foreign, drawn in shapes he had never seen or felt before, colors from pallettes that didn’t exist, at least not in his range of hues. It was what he imagined the world looked like to a goldfish, distorted and warped by the glass wrapped around them.

He wondered if the vision would clear if he got closer. Stepped out. Lit a flare and tried to find Dean in the ever-increasing fog.

But here, Seth knows the lines. He knows the pen they are written with, can recognize the handwriting at a glance. Not only that, he knows how they blur them; he knows their technique, how they will hold him under water until he disintegrates into nothing or makes his own meaning out of the mess. If he walks towards Dean, he doesn’t know if he will find anything at all, if the picture he once saw - the quick mess of colors and shapes and lines moving too fast for the eye to decipher - will be there at all, or if it’s been torn to pieces and replaced with a new one. But he walks out here, pushes past the curtain, and he knows the picture, he’s already seen it, knows the landscape and the figures and the lighting and the pallette; all he has to do is find the place set out for him in it, where he belongs, his piece of the picture.


End file.
